Pandagon is daily opinion blog covering feminism, politics, and pop culture. Come for the politics, stay for the complete lack of patience for the B.S. and bad faith coming from conservative leaders and pundits.

How Dare Liberals Suggest Race Has Anything to Do With Obama-Hatred?!

Roger Ailes, you know the guy who runs the favorite news network of right wing America, has some ideas about what makes President Obama tick. As reported here at Raw Story, Vanity Fair has excerpted part of a new book out about Ailes written by Zev Chafets, and he got the chief of Fox News to drop this rather amazing quote:

After Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen suggested that Ann Romney “never worked a day in her life,” Ailes immediately countered that it was Obama who was the “lazy” one.

“Obama’s the one who never worked a day in his life,” he quipped. “He never earned a penny that wasn’t public money. How many fund-raisers does he attend every week? How often does he play basketball and golf? I wish I had that kind of time. He’s lazy, but the media won’t report that.”

Yes, folks, Ailes really has convinced himself that being a wealthy housewife is more work than being the director of a community-organizing non-profit, the editor of Harvard Law Review, a lawyer, a memoirist, a law professor, a civil rights attorney, a state senator, a U.S. Senator and then the President. I’d point out how many of those jobs aren’t government jobs, but since I reject the notion that working for the government is somehow not-work, I won’t. Calling Obama “lazy” is a stretch beyond all stretches, and pretending that Republican politicians don’t do fund-raisers—or that fund-raising isn’t real work that normal human beings loathe—is just the icing on the cake. (In fact, I’d argue that Ann Romney really earns her bread not by being a housewife who never has to clean or cook anything, but by being a fundraiser for her husband.) The real question here is how Obama managed to have a life at all with all this work going on in his life, and by all accounts, the answer is that he often didn’t. For instance, until he moved into the White House, Obama never lived with his daughters full-time, because he was working too much.

So let’s not dick around about this: Ailes grabbed for “lazy” because it’s a nasty stereotype about black people that was developed by white people who felt entitled to have black people work themselves to the bone in service of white people, and got mad at even the slightest hint of resistance. That’s the beginning and end of that story. This is the man who sets the agenda for Fox News. I realize it’s not a big surprise that he feels this way, but if he’s willing to say something so obvious to a reporter, just imagine what kind of ideas he wants his employees to dress up in a veneer of plausible deniability and push out on the public.

About the Author

Amanda Marcotte is a freelance journalist born and bred in Texas, but now living in the writer reserve of Brooklyn. She focuses on feminism, national politics, and pop culture, with the order shifting depending on her mood and the state of the nation.